Jake Schneider

“Visit Berlin’s Yiddishland” Walking Tour

In the early twentieth century, Berlin’s Scheunenviertel was the most visible Jewish place in the city, where Yiddish was spoken on the street and Jewish immigrants and refugees from eastern Europe made a temporary home. 

Today the traces of this vibrant community have been almost entirely erased. On this twilight walking tour full of local music and family stories, we try to reimagine Jewish life on these once bustling streets and, in a small way, bring it back.

Basics

  • Language: English, Yiddish, or German always with Yiddish music
  • Price: Private tours are priced individually, starting at €200
  • Meeting point: Usually Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz, Berlin
  • Duration: Between 1 and 2.5 hours
  • Ending point: The tour usually ends about a 10 minute walk from the starting point, near the U8 Weinmeisterstraße station

Dates

The public tours are currently paused. To request a private tour for yourself or a group, please contact me using the form on this page and we can discuss the options and pricing. 

I can also design customized tours for up to 25 people depending on your interests and needs.

I also recommend subscribing to the Shtetl Berlin newsletter for information on current events related to Yiddish culture in Berlin. They are the best at publicizing news for the entire scene, including other projects I am involved in.

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On the site of a long-gone home
On the site of a long-gone home
A family story
A family story
Collectively rewinding
Collectively rewinding
A Yiddish singalong
A Yiddish singalong
"Radicals and revolutionaries"
"Radicals and revolutionaries"

Photos from a tour with students at Bard College Berlin, courtesy of the college

An Exercise in Time Travel

There are hardly any noticeable historic sights in the Schneunenviertel, which is now a gentrified, mostly residential area in central Berlin. However, if you know how to look, there is plenty of cultural history written in the streets.

The tour covers many aspects of Jewish immigrants’ lives in this busy neighborhood from 1900 to 1938, including domestic life, music, theater, education, politics, religious practices, and day-to-day work, all from the perspective of the individuals and families who lived here. 

You will get to know them personally, hear Yiddish music originally recorded right here, and enter another era as the sun sets.

Perspective

This tour was originally developed in Yiddish for the participants of the 2022 Yiddish in Berlin summer program. 

By popular demand, it has been adapted into English and has since been offered to university and high school classes, tour groups, and the general public.

The tour is still from the perspective of Yiddish-speaking immigrants to Berlin, including myself, although it is accessible to a general audience and also describes their relationships with neighbors of other cultural and religious backgrounds.

Traces of Berlin’s Yiddishland

A group of children with backpacks around an ice cream stand
Children buying kosher ice cream on a hot day in Berlin
The Kempler family poses in front of their cafe in the Scheunenviertel
The Kempler family poses in front of their cafe in the Scheunenviertel
The Kaftan cabaret around 1930
The Kaftan cabaret around 1930
The Hebräische Buchhandlung (selling Jewish books and Judaica), 1920s
The Hebräische Buchhandlung (selling Jewish books and Judaica), 1920s
Milgroym, a Yiddish cultural journal published in Berlin, 1922
Milgroym, a Yiddish cultural journal published in Berlin, 1922
The Yiddish Encyclopedia, initiated in Berlin in 1930
The Yiddish Encyclopedia, initiated in Berlin in 1930
The Berlin letterhead of YIVO, to this day the foremost Yiddish scholarly institution
The Berlin letterhead of YIVO, to this day the foremost Yiddish scholarly institution
A page from a brochure showing a printing house buidling with a page of beautifully set type in Yiddish
Berlin‘s Berthold Druckerei, which printed Yiddish books
Dora Diamant: actor, Jüdisches Volksheim volunteer, Yiddish activist
Dora Diamant: actor, Jüdisches Volksheim volunteer, Yiddish activist

Testimonials

Seeing beneath the layers of time. Photo by Arndt Beck of Yiddish.Berlin
Thank you so, so much for this wonderful tour you created. It was so rich in information about the era, social circumstances, politics and diversity of Jewish life in the Scheunenviertel and together with all the personal stories ... the aesthetic framing of sunset and the beautiful music, it was a vivid experience.
Marie-Luise GamigParticipant in public tour
Jake Schneider talking to a group standing in a circle on the sidewalk at a snowy Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz
A walk with Jake through this former Jewish neighbourhood brings a lost landscape vividly to life, through well researched stories of the people who once occupied these streets. An unmissable Berlin experience!
Rachel LichtensteinArtist, writer, oral historian, and curator focused on place, memory, and Jewish identity
The author Rachel Lichtenstein wearing a hat and scarf by the side of a river, with a lamppost in the background
The tour is still vividly in my mind. On the weekend we were wandering around galleries in the Scheunenviertel... I do see the streets with new eyes. You had a way of telling a story, making these characters seem real and relatable, that is so gentle and inviting.
Dr. Michael Thomas TaylorGuest Faculty, Bard College Berlin, who arranged a tour with his class
Dr. Michael Thomas Taylor
Our tour guide, Jake Schneider ... had warned us that on this tour we would need to imagine the unseen for ourselves. And indeed with his well-researched narration, with pictures and with music, he brought that neighborhood and that era to life for us.
Sheva ZuckerFormer Executive Director of League for Yiddish, in a feature for Afn Shvel magazine. Sheva took the original Yiddish tour.
Yiddish and English Logo of Afn Shvel
What you are doing is very important in many ways. After all, what remains and endures is what is remembered and spoken about.
Dr. Yulia FurmanMinority Studies, Goethe University Frankfurt
Logo of "Minority Studies: Language and Identity" at Goethe University Frankfurt

Save Your Spot

To register for one of the public tours, fill out the form above. They fill up quickly, so better to reserve now and cancel later if necessary.

To request a private or group tour, to be notified of future dates, or if you have any further questions, send me a message.